Bengaluru-headquartered Happiest Minds Technologies focuses on digital transformation and disruptive technologies.

Disruptive technologies include big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), mobility, cloud, security, unified communications among others. Apart from India, its operations include the US, the UK, Singapore and Australia.

The three-year-old company, which reported an annual run rate (expected annual revenue) of $50 million, has secured $52.5 million Series-A funding. Its investors include Ashok Soota, JP Morgan Private Equity Group and Intel Capital.

According to Sandeep Agarwal, Senior Vice-President, Product Engineering Services, Happiest Minds, IoT will definitely be a focus area. In an interview to BusinessLine , he talks about the company’s expected growth, hiring plans and focus areas. Edited excerpts:

What sort of revenue growth are you expecting?

We are hoping for a 60 per cent revenue growth.

And, hiring plans?

We are at 1,450 and hope to grow by 40 per cent.

So far in the first three years, our focus has been on ateral hiring and very few freshers. We have not gone to any college for campus recruits. This year in December, we intend to go for campus recruits. But, the numbers will be small.

Going forward what are the verticals that will be the major contributor towards your top-line?

For us, retail, telecom and education contribute more at the moment from the revenue standpoint. But going forward, we have started investing in automotive and industrial automation (plant automation). When I say telecom, and I do an IoT project for the automotive segment, should I count is as an automotive or telecom revenue, these lines will blur.

Internet of Things form a big part of your focus area. What are the opportunities you see in this segment, especially in the context of smart cities?

One of parts in information and communications technology landscape of a smart city is IoT. And for that to happen, broadband connectivity is a must. Our play (for Happiest Mind) is not in broadband area. That is for the telcos. Assuming there’s back-end connectivity, we’ll look at three modes of operations.

One is to target the device companies that will look at making the smart devices – this means a better connected one and some analytics that can happen at the device-end itself. We are enabling some of the device companies to come up with such offerings. The second is people who have such connected devices and will look to connect to the cloud to share their data. They will require some cloud agent to enable them to communicate with the cloud. This is another area where we will help them out.

The third customer type is by leveraging the SMAC (social, mobile, data analytics and cloud). They have connectivity and share some data outside. We enable them with the cloud and the analytics part including exposing the application programme interfaces they want to.

Then there are opportunities in big data architecture, and at times visualisation of the data.

But for all this to happen, you need the basic internet to be there and at a constant speed. Is that happening?

At the enterprise level, I can get a steady connection whether it’s a broadband or Wi-Fi. So implementing an IoT there (at enterprise level) isn’t a problem.

But when it mes to the outside world, or on a public access level, people are still trying different options so that the last mile connectivity happens – Airtel picking up stake in the OneWeb project or Facebook experimenting with drones and so on.

However, IoT need not be implemented at one go and in one shot. There are aspects of IoT that one can begin with.

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